Page 69 of The Shield

“Look at you,” he groaned, watching my face contort with pleasure. “Mayor of Charleston and still begging for me.”

I came again, spasming around him, nails raking his back. His rhythm broke, hips jerking, and he came with a roar, hot and thick inside me, filling me until I sagged boneless against him.

We stayed like that, tangled and breathless on the mayor’s desk, the city quiet outside, the world changed forever.

Later, when we were dressed again and laughing at the mess we’d made of my first executive workspace, Ethan leaned against a wall, hair damp from sweat and eyes dark with something deeper than lust.

“Atlas wants us to move into a suite at Dominion Hall,” he said. “Near Jacob and Caleb’s.”

I tilted my head. “And do you?”

“I think sometimes, yeah. It’d be good to have a bolt-hole. A place where no one can touch us.” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “But I want to live with you. In your little house that smells like coffee and lavender.”

“Both,” I said. “We’ll take both. Home and fortress.”

His smile softened. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

We had already tested the road together—Miami, New Orleans. Standing on pump houses, talking with city engineers, eating gumbo with planners who had scars from their own storms. He teased me about turning our love story into homework, and I teased him about not fitting in plane seats, his long legs jammed against tray tables like a punishment.

But those trips had done something steady to us—burnished us, sealed us. Traveling together, working together, loving eachother through fatigue and laughter, it had fused us in ways even sex couldn’t.

That night, after the desk and the victory and the laughter, we lay in bed at my little house. Ethan’s hand rested heavy on my stomach, his breath warm against my neck.

“You’re mayor,” he whispered.

“I am.”

“And I’m yours.”

“You are.”

He went very still, then pushed up on an elbow like a thought had just found him and wouldn’t let go. “Wait,” he murmured, voice rough from everything we’d done and said that day. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, pawed his jeans off the chair, and came back to me—then did the old-fashioned thing that split my chest open: he knelt, big body folded at the edge of my ridiculous little bed.

“Natalie,” he said, looking up at me like I’d hung the constellations he navigated by. “I don’t have poetry. I have a life I want to build, walls with windows, a porch with your feet in my lap, and every boring heroic day in between. Let me be the man who keeps you alive and laughing, who holds the line when the storm is loud, who is your shield when you need one and your open door when you don’t. Marry me.”

From his fist he opened his palm: a slender gold ring crowned with a bright, clean diamond, warm from his skin. I knew immediately he’d carried it for days, waiting for the moment that felt like us.

Myyescame up from someplace older than language. “Yes,” I said, and then again, because once wasn’t enough. “Yes.”

He slid the ring onto my finger, and it seated like something that had been destined for that exact piece of me. I hauled him up and kissed him, salty and laughing, the two of us grinning like thieves who’d just gotten away with the best thing.

“Flapjack’s going to be offended he wasn’t part of this,” I said against his mouth.

“He’ll pout,” Ethan agreed. “We’ll make it up to him—ring bearer at the wedding. Braided lead rope. Formal mane.”

“With a boutonnière,” I said. “And yes, before you ask, someone will try to televise it.”

“National primetime: The Horse, The Mayor, and The Guy With the Ring,” he deadpanned.

“Hard pass,” I said. “This one’s just for us.”

“Just for us,” he echoed.

“Forward only,” I said, my heart so full it ached.

Outside, Charleston exhaled, a city waiting for boring heroics, for drains that worked and buses that ran and a woman who had almost died and come back stronger.

Inside, I held the man I loved—my fiancé—already writing the next chapter in the quiet of our breaths. And when the quiet turned to heat, I pulled him back to me and we loved each other again and again, until the night itself seemed to surrender.